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Today's photo is of the Clutha No.5, a passenger ferry built by TB Seath & Sons of Rutherglen for the Clyde Navigation Trust. The no. 5 came into service in 1884 and worked until 1903.

The Glasgow Story website has information about the history of these passenger ferries and an article written by Andrew McQueen is available online at Scribd which gives a fuller history of these "waterbuses".

Specification details available from the Clydebuilt site along with this interesting information provided by Stuart Cameron, about what you can see in the photo:

"In the background the spire of the University of Glasgow can be seen in the background on Gilmorehill. The ship on the left is berthed at D&W Henderson's fitting out quay on the west bank of the River Kelvin. The two ship's under construction are in the Pointhouse shipyard of A & J Inglis. To the right of them is the north bank slipway of the Govan ferry the the Partick Steamboat Wharf."

I have uploaded the Catalogue for the Dan McDonald collection to our website. It is in spreadsheet format which although not as easily searchable as a database you can still perform a search across all the sheets using the find function CTRL+F.

Information about Dan McDonald himself can be found here and the catalogue has been arranged into sections as follows:
Section 1. Miscellaneous Vessels 1930-1980. Comprises a list of all types of vessels for which a basic index and reference system was used.

Section 2. Miscellaneous Steam and Motor Vessels. 1920-1950 which were not indexed or identified.

Section 3. Clyde steamers and other passenger vessels trading on the river.

Section 4. Sea going sailing vessels.

Section 5. Coastal sailing vessels.

Section 6. "Views” of scenery, buildings, boatyards etc.

Section 7. Exposures taken during voyages on puffers 1949-1972.

Section 8. Negatives of the yacht AILIE and other miscellaneous yachts, 1925-1930.

After several phone calls to skip companies and estimates of the size of our courtyard and the amount of rubbish we have to get rid of last week our skip arrived this morning.

I forgot to take a picture of it looking all empty so instead here's the skip 3/4 full.

Everything we are throwing away is either rubbish, duplicates or items that didn't pass the appraisal process.

So it took us all afternoon to fill it up which was pretty good going considering there was only 4 of us working on it.

We still have about half of the dump pile* left to get rid of so at least 1 more skip is going to be required, possibly 2 if we also want to clear out some space for more shelves and fewer dyeline machines.

*Dump pile - the art of constructing the dump pile is a post for another day, once I've been trained in it but it looks a little bit like this:

For today's photo I've chosen two in the Dan McDonald collection taken at the launch of the replica Comet in 1962.

This Comet was a replica of Henry Bell's steamship originally built in 1812 to mark its 150th anniversary. It was built by Lithgows in Port Glasgow and Kincaid's made the engines. Until recently this replica was on display in Port Glasgow but a project has been begun to refurbish this ship ahead of the 200th anniversary in 2012.

A memoir of Henry Bell is available online here and specification details for both the 1962 Comet and the 1812 Comet are available from the Clydebuilt site.

Aside from the Dan McDonald collection, the only other collection the Ballast Trust owns is Bill Lind's own personal collections some of which were stored here and we have inherited. This collection contains several smaller collections which will in time be catalogued and donated to an appropriate archive or museum such as:

Today's photo is of the MV Blythswood, a dredger built in 1963 by Fergusons. It was built for the Clyde Navigation Trust. It looks like its got some pretty serious equipment on it but I haven't a clue what they would be used for, presumably dredging?

About

The Ballast Trust is a charitable foundation established in 1988 that provides a rescue, sorting and cataloguing service for business archives with an emphasis on technical records such as shipbuilding, railway and engineering plans, drawings and photographs.